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Comment by PommeDeTerre | Hacker News Reader

What exactly is "amazing" about it?

This is the sort of functionality that has been made available by numerous text editors and IDEs for numerous programming languages for many, many years now.

It's somewhat unusual to see how so many in the JavaScript and web development communities can get so excited about catching up to where basically everybody else was decades ago. It'd be one thing if JavaScript and web development were new creations, but they're not.

While this may be useful in some cases, it's surely not "amazing".

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Did you also look at Google Docs when it first came out and remark that gamers have been playing together online in the same arena for years?

IntelliJ is my IDE. I'm excited about this because it's in a web application, not because I've never seen code completion before.

I looked at Google Docs when it first came out and it reminded me of something I saw in 1968.

I'm intrigued. Can you describe this 1968 product? What was it called?

I'm pretty sure he's referring to 'The mother of all demos' by Ebgelbart, where he demonstrated live collaborative document editing among dozens of ludicrously ahead of its time software features. [1]

That said, I disagree with the larger point the op is making. When you work in a technical field you tend to figure out the tool for a task, grin and near through a finicky setup process and then dismissing improvements that reduce that friction as trivial/unimportant, even though those improvements mean its able to solve the problem for an exponentially larger market.

A classic example is rsync and dropbox. It's less pronounced here, but the more advanced web code editors get, the longer someone interested in the topic can mess around and try things out without setting up a local dev environment (multiple hours of totally unfun work if you're a novice), the more likely they are to stay interested and push through and get over that hump when the time comes.

[1]The video(100% worth watching) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY Wikipedia: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

When I first looked at Google Docs, it reminded me of the desktop office suites I had used back in the early 1990s.

The core functionality was, and still is, quite limited. In some cases it's still inferior to what those early office suites offered.

The ability to access and share documents over a network is nothing new. We did it all the time back then. There was even software back then that enabled collaborative editing of documents, in real-time.

For all the hype we hear about how great JavaScript is as a programming language, and how great web apps are, we just don't see that translating to improved software.

When these web apps don't offer anything beyond what we had with desktop software decades ago (and in many cases are even worse), it's hard to get excited about them, and it's impossible to consider them to be "amazing".

This is not the only online IDE or the first :)

c9.io codenvy.com nitrous.io

>It's somewhat unusual to see how so many in the JavaScript and web development communities can get so excited about catching up to where basically everybody else was decades ago.

If you can run your IDE in a browser, it means you can access your IDE (and presumably your code) from any computer or mobile device with a browser (it also naturally opens up certain use-cases like google docs-style collaboration). That's what makes it special. Do you not get it?

We made one of those at HP/Palm for building webOS applications in Enyo. It was called Ares. It was rad.

Alas, HP's CEO in 2011 was mind-bogglingly stupid and of course, killed off Palm

>HP's CEO in 2011 was mind-bogglingly stupid and of course, killed off Palm

Oh Yeah.

What's happening with Enyo these days anyway? It looks like the project is kinda dead.

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